Saturday 1 September 2012 19.06 EDT
First published on Saturday 1 September 2012 19.06 EDT

While Sly Bailey was in charge of Trinity Mirror, its shares slid 90%. While her freshly promulgated successor, Simon Fox, was in charge of HMV, its shares fell 98%. Yet Fox's appointment is greeted with enthusiasm on the exchanges. Trinity shares promptly rise 5%. Discuss – or rather, scratch your head.

Maybe the hope of innovative thinking is what it's about. Sly wasn't an innovator: she simply cut costs and then ran out of road. But for easy riders on the City carousel, Fox looks rather more interesting – probably because the industry parallels seem so pat.

Take a business losing 10% of its sales year after year. The recession is hurting, but it's digital that brings the most relentless pain. Simply, the wonders of online are killing your basic products: CDs, DVDs and books. Do you just sit there and shut more shops? Or do you try to reinvent yourself as a broader entertainment brand – selling tickets, owning venues and clubs, running festivals, managing musicians – and go determinedly digital yourself?

We could, in crude outline, be talking about the dilemma of any big newspaper operation (and Fox has been a non-exec at Guardian Media Group for two years). The hope is that he can give Trinity Mirror the kiss of life he sought to bring to HMV. But the parallels don't stop there. Why has what appeared to be a promising way forward stalled, with all those venues and Waterstones sold off, and engines of transformation put on hold? Because profits have shrunk; because sales are down 20%; because HMV's debt meant something desperate – like asking suppliers to invest – had to be done.

Ah! we could be talking papers again, as print advertising slumps faster than digital grows and pension-fund overhangs increase. Fox will need to get very innovative indeed. But broad brushes will also need to get more discriminating. How much is Trinity's gloom, especially at national level, exacerbated by years of inert non-investment? Are DVDs and words on paper utterly comparable? Fox didn't think so when he talked about books. "Unlike music, the book is not a broken product: the book is a fabulous product," he once declared (before selling Waterstones).

And discrimination also means taking fashionable assumptions case by case. Look at the plight of the regional press Fox now joins. Year-on-year circulation drops of 10% are common in the latest six-monthly ABC figures. But there's still a research project lurking amid so much gloom. Take the Exmouth Herald and the Goole Courier. Ponder the Alloa Advertiser, the Coalville Mail and the Bucks Free Press. These are just some of the titles that kept losses under 3%. Some, indeed, finished more or less even over a brutal 12 months. Many made decent money. They must be doing something right. As so many local weeklies cry woe and the end of their world, it would be nice to know precisely what: and Simon Fox, as outsider, will need to be very interested in that, too.

■ Lord Justice Leveson sprays a "confidential" 118-page letter of early criticisms around Fleet Street (in the process of limbering up for his report). The editor of the Independent describes it as a "diatribe", a "completely one-sided" attack that resembles "loading a gun". Another, unnamed, executive calls it "excoriating".

Well, we shall see if fairness and balance follow in a separate envelope; but meanwhile LJL is described as "disappointed" that his comments "are being openly discussed in the press". Which, alas, is just another indication that, after 10 months of listening, he still doesn't quite get it. Send a secret diatribe to every editor and what do you expect? Just "disappointment" if it doesn't leak instantly.